To me, great flash fiction gets two opposing things to work together: economy and detail.

Economy: You can always say it with less. Use meaty, hard-working words. I love vocabulary, richness of language, even odd word choices if they carry real feelings. Your words color your writing.

Details: These stand for a bigger story. Don’t be afraid to get specific, even in a short paragraph. I am really into characters. Show how someone stirs his tea, or how she puts her shoes on. Zoom in.

♦♦♦♦♦

Betsy is a science/speculative fiction artist and author. She grew up drawing on tractor-feed computer paper her dad brought home nightly from the Lawrence Livermore Lab. She did her Fortran homework on a Cray, in return for logging in and saving her dad’s files.

Betsy’s calls her early career “Mister Toad’s Wild Ride Through Corporate America.” She has worked in film/video production, software design, animation, web design and video games – amid Internet booms and busts in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s made single-panel cartoons since forever, and publishes them all over the world (she’s a regular in The Funny Times). She is most proud of her cartoon in the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory’s traveling exhibit on black holes.

Betsy is publishing her first novel in 2015, a YA science fiction story entitled Silverwood. Her fiction has been published by Literary Orphans, Fiction Vortex, Story Shack, and Perihelion Science Fiction. She writes and illustrates a serial sci fi story entitled “Neptune Road.”

She lives in Northern California with her two weird kids, an idiosyncratic husband, two misunderstood cats, and a totally normal tarantula.

See her art and stories at http://www.betsystreeter.com.